a cold front came in tonight, and now it’s crispy cold and wet, like condensation on fresh lettuce in the fridge. i am going to read dracula until i fall asleep, warmed by the radiation in my arms.
but first, i think my download problem is fixed, yay! try it out with this and tell me if it works or not.
i’ve no clue as to the reasoning behind it, but lately i am seeing the return of my repetitive strain injury. my worsening rsi was part of the reason i quit my web design job and went back to school. i figured if i wasn’t spending eight hours a day on a computer, my rsi would probably go away. and it did go away, for quite awhile. last semester the tingling aches in my arms and the numbness in my back had all but disappeared.
right now, however, i can barely type with my right hand.
and i hate it. i hate the fact that the two things i love doing most in the world are causing me to feel as if my arms don’t belong to me. i hate that when i reach back to touch my shoulder blade, i can’t feel it at all. i hate that the bones in my right forearm feel like electric heat rods deep down, radiating waves of ache out towards my skin.
can any of you teach me some keyboard-mouse telepathy?
tonight at artiste i was sitting at one of the booths, alternately writing my anne bradstreet paper and reading dracula. it’s quite amusing, at least for a professorly english major, to write a paper on a stalwart puritan woman’s view of god and salvation, only to abandon it in favor of a book about homoerotic bloodsucking. sinners and saints night, i like to call it.
thomas came and sat with me, and we discussed (while intermittently staring off into space, confused) the fact that today both of us felt dazed and out of it. i compared the feeling in my head to a plate of sharp cheddar cheese nachos that had been left sitting on the counter for a couple of hours (rendering the chips soggy and the cheese congealed and greasy), and then squished into a ball and stuffed between my ears. thomas, on the other hand, said his brain was velveeta. which is probably made of snot and yellow #5, anyway.
it occurs to me recently (recently being pretty late in the game, as i’ve been doing this for a year now) that this writing of short pieces on the web is honing my writing technique but is doing virtually nothing for my narrative- or character-constructing skills (unless you consider me a character (which some do)). ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, though, so i will get on that shit soon.
(also, who knew that shaun and i are writing the same paper on the same topic for the same class at the same time? not you, i bet. but he’s chronicling his entire experience (or at least he was (until an hour (well, seventy-two minutes) ago)).)
plays attended which were authored by my drama professor: 1/2
unruly schoolchildren present at the play: 3 zillion
unruly schoolchildren eating taco bell during the play: 3 zillion
unruly schoolchildren who laughed in all the wrong places: 3 zillion
unruly schoolchildren who received looks of death from me and my classmates: 3 zillion
plays deserted at intermission: 1
anne bradstreet papers written: 7/8
loads of laundry completed: 2
dell support representatives spoken with: 1
minutes spent on phone with dell support representative: 45
unsuccessful attempts to fix my monitor: 11
fuzzy gray lines streaking across my display: 3 zillion
brand-new monitors being shipped to me by dell: 1
holy cow, today is just as productive as yesterday. and i have a knife wound on my arm, which makes me look so tough and cool and hard-core. i am a total badass.
oh, i forgot. pigtails: 2
today is a good day.
before british novel class hanh walked up to me with a backpack full of a shoebox full of cds! she lent me twenty of her cds just because! there is a lot of saint etienne, some smiths, stone roses, my bloody valentine, the housemartins, and a bunch of other stuff. can you feel me getting schooled as we speak? you probably can’t!
so rob and i wrote hanh a song during class, passing the piece of paper back and forth, taking turns with the verses. i took the bridge, most of which was “oh, no!” and “bay-beeeeeeee!”, and rob wrote the chorus, which consisted of “dah-dah-dah, no! no! no!” and the like. she loved it, though, especially the part that went, “she bought me a burrito at la tapatia” and the part that said, “her trident gum helps me fight gum disease.” we don’t know what the tune is, but we do know that it’s totally electrified.
after class i went to the library, which got evacuated as soon as i walked in. so instead i went and talked to my american fiction professor, who told me that one of my assignments was brilliant. rock! then phil and i went to artiste, where in two hours i read a long anne bradstreet poem and came up with a thesis statement and an extended outline for a paper i have to write on said poem. i felt smart and cool and productive and happy.
today was a good day until just now when i unloaded the dishwasher and accidentally stabbed myself in the arm with a paring knife. i am still attempting to stanch the flow of blood.
i was driving back from dinner this evening and i turned on the radio, a thing i rarely do since buying a sorry excuse for a portable cd player. what i thought was “under pressure” turned out to be “ice ice baby,” so of course i cranked the volume right up in the name of cultural research. sadly, i discovered that the song we’d all loved so much as impressionable twelve-year-olds in fact completely sucks. anything less than the best really is a felony.
and of course, houston radio being the abysmal place that it is, “in a big country” came on next. so i cranked it up for that one, too, remembering that last year when we were working on this site, we’d yell “dreams stay with you!” every time someone mentioned the company name. you remember.
i pulled into my parking space, got out of the car, and walked up to the back door of my apartment, at which point i inadvertently stepped on a frog, crushing it. it felt and sounded like breaking glass.
